Zink is a printing technology that makes me worried about the future of our species.

My dad used to work at a print company. Truck-sized printing presses were a hassle to set up, maintain, and clean. To print a photo, you had to use multiple plates, one for each color. It was expensive and messy, but the prints were beautiful.

After high school, I moved to California, where I worked in digital printing — glorified photocopiers, basically. Digital printing made it possible to do shorter print runs, with way less cost and setup time, but the quality suffered. You could see and feel the raised dots of the ink, the colors were typically desaturated and dull, and the wrong amount of humidity in the room could wreck your image.

Fast-forward to 2018, and I can go days without touching a piece of paper or a “real” photograph. Screens are so good, I can barely look away from them for a second. And yet companies like Polaroid, HP, and now Canon are pushing this Zink garbage on me.